More stories about Dominion Lending Centres

Brokers react to RateHub announcement

RateHub.ca will join forces with an influential channel player to launch a new brokerage, with several brokers arguing the move is a betrayal.

“We’ve helped build the beast and now the beast has turned on us,” Jivan Sanghera of Dominion Lending Centres Home Capital Solutions told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “This caught me completely off guard and I feel blindsided; they stand to alienate a lot of brokers by doing this.”

James Laird, who recently left his management post with True North Mortgage, will manage the as-yet unnamed brokerage which is set to launch later this year. Its rates will appear alongside the other 40+ brokers on the pages of RateHub.ca and will pay the same fees.

“We know that it’s essential if we want to retain our customers who have been amazing that we have to be 100 per cent transparent and fair, so RateHub needs to continue to operate in the way that it does today,” Alyssa Richard, CEO of RateHub told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “It has to list rates from lowest to highest; the customer chooses which broker to work with and there will be absolutely zero skimming of leads.

“We understand that rate sites work today but the margins aren’t incredibly fat for brokers and so it’s very important for all of our brokers to get those large leads to make sure that the economics of purchasing leads from us still makes sense.”

The announcement has been met with optimism by Paul Poirier, a mortgage broker with Dominion Lending Centres Eagle Group, who sources approximately 30 per cent of his business through RateHub.

Looking for an online alternative to generate leads without participating in rate buy-downs? Promote your professionalism and leverage your social campaigns on www.MortgageResource.ca. It’s a model that consumers demand, and one which you can thrive in. Being part of a national community of mortgage industry thought leaders is the best way to not only keep up, but to pull ahead.

Well, we can all see that true North pays a ratehub good money for their leads, clearly… True North is all over all of the rates throughout the ratehub site… It would be interesting to hear what Dan at True North feels about this?… Will they keep putting the same budget in to Ratehub ?

Also a good thought.. If great hub is going to hand leads out the same, then why would Laird move to a different a brand new brokerage, in fact ... Whole new brand.

Jivan makes a good point, we as brokers have helped pay, and build a Ratehub "Brand".. Now that Brand is our competition.

Will be interesting to see if the service stays the same to us paying brokers.

This should be no surprise. The obvious strategy of any direct to consumer approach (and a rate site is a direct to consumer approach by definition) is to disintermediate the middle man, namely the mortgage broker, and create a straighter line connection between online demand and manufacturing supply. This strategy necessarily inserts the "website and fulfillment center" as the new middleman.

Brokers should not be surprised. They act as free and variable cost labor that is a useful surrogate until such time as the website hits critical mass and the economics support in-house processing and fulfillment.

Amazon does not refer its book leads to Barnes & Noble. And iTunes doesn't farm out its online leads to H&M. Last I checked Netflix didn't enhance the business of Blockbuster.

This would result in increased inefficiency, cost and extra layers that is counter to the "straighter line" mantra of any direct to consumer online strategy.

The good news is that taken to its obvious conclusions rates sites will ultimately strive to teach consumers to "do it themselves directly" and in so doing sow the seeds of their own creative destruction as they develop a market large enough for the banks and mono-lines to simply keep and spend their fees financing their own "direct to consumer" online strategies.

In the medium term they cannot win -they are merely a new middleman eventually ripe for disintermediation too - they are neither demand nor supply.